TL;DR - deepwork.today helps you to keep a tab on your day. Always know how much time you have to get work done. Decline unnecessary meetings. Sign up to save time and improve your productivity.
I made the app in the open with React and Firebase. I used React hooks. I felt I could express operations like accessing firestore, firebase authentication, using media queries to adapt layout etc. to be quiet concise and readable. I encourage you to check out the repo especially if you are interested in a reference codebase with React hooks and Firebase.
Hello folks!
Our last employer was a large corporate and we recognised our collaboration efforts were unorganised — absent agendas, unclear goals, too many participants. These ambiguous meetings not only came at the cost of productive time but it also informed our disengagement and made us question our own agency to do good work.
I had been using Pomodoro technique for over four years. It made my daily efforts more consistent. But no matter how well I planned my day, ad hoc meetings and other distraction within my organisation left me unfulfilled.
When we quit our jobs, we had some time to ourselves. We did some thinking to improve our personal collaboration efforts.
And deepwork.today is the outcome of these thoughts.
It provides
⏲️ Deepwork clock is aware of your daily schedule. We have experienced that focus cannot be turned on and off like a switch, so we set aside some cool-off time for every meeting. The clock constantly keeps you updated on the time you have left to get work done.
📗 Bite sized guides to help you gauge the importance and relevance of a meeting. And if you find a valid reason to decline the meeting we provide you with a template response.
💁 Tips to help you improve meetings. We read a few articles on how to do meetings better and condensed them to easily readable takeaways.
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📈 Meeting Analytics to give you an overview of your meeting habits over time. These figures will help you decide
- whether collaboration to personal work ratio is lopsided
- can meeting durations be made more effective
- busiest day of the week
- top collaborators
Lets open a discussion
This is an early release. We chose to share this first with dev.to community because as programmers we are required to strike a balance between our personal priorities and priorities of our collaborators. So we need interventions to shine clarity on our intentions.
I would like you folks to join the discussion and help me understand
- top 2 things that you would do daily to maintain balance between collaboration and productivity
- how often do you decline meetings? what are the usual reasons? If you have any polite ways to say no.
Please try out the app. And share your feedbacks.
- do you think if we allow you to rate meetings(or a simple 👍 👎), would that be helpful?
- if you would like add more reasons to our decline meeting guide
- if you would like more tips
- any particular meeting analytics you would like to add and why
You can leave your feedbacks here in the comments or DM me on twitter.
Also, if you like the app, please share it with your friends and colleagues. It’s a free app. We want to genuinely understand how to make collaborations more impactful while not trading off personal productivity. If we get more feedback, the app can get better at supporting diverse work life habits.
Thank you.
Illustration Credit - absurd.design
Top comments (15)
I have never been more excited to try out an app! I am a big fan of Deep Work and am always on the lookout for apps that can help me prioritize deep work. Just signed up -- will keep you informed about my experience :)
Thats awesome Amruta
Yeah, let us know if there are already things you do to prioritise deep work. Any practice that can be part of the app and shared with others.
I would love to see a pomodoro timer within the app. And also a log of Deep Work hours per day (as of now, I maintain it on my GCal).
The app's been syncing my gcal to my account for over an hour now -- any idea how long it's expected to take?
Hi Amruta, Arijit and I worked together on this app. Sorry that you are facing trouble with syncing. Usually it syncs within few seconds unless there is some permission issue or we encountered an edge case. Try in another browser just in case. We will check it and send you a notification.
We have contemplated to add Pomodoro tracking within the app, and a breakup of deepwork distribution across #project categories. Or perhaps an integration with one of the common pomodoro apps. Which pomodoro timer app do you use?
If you are logging a calendar event for deep work where there is no other recipient, we do not consider that as a meeting and do not track that in your meeting analytics. But this could be an interesting stat we can show you in a new analytics card telling you how much time you have spent in deep work. We will see if many people use their calendars to log their individual deep work like yours.
I use the Forest app as my Pomodoro timer. As for the calendar event for deep work, I do that right now because I don't have another way to track it. I don't think you need to sync my deep work events from my gcal to your app -- I think if I have the Pomodoro timer in your app, then the number of sessions per day would serve as my deep work log and that's good enough!
About the sync issues: Will try it on another browser and report back.
Tried on Firefox and Chrome..no luck :(
Hey Amruta
Right now deepwork.today centres around meetings. We show you potential time left for work today because we know how much time you will be spending in meetings.
We also allow you to decide whether a meeting is relevant and show you meeting tips and analytics.
I understand you are expecting deepwork in terms of focus times but we define it as non-meeting times in your work day.
So, the app functions only if you provide permission to access your calendar events. We will soon release a fix where we set this expectations upfront instead of showing you a loader.
For pomodoro, I have been using Pomotodo for some years now. You can associate a task with the spent Pomo. So, when you complete a task you know how much pomos were spent on it. This helps me in time estimation. Maybe you will like it. It has some analytics too as well.
Thanks.
Oh, the app looks incredible! Thanks for sharing :)
Really slick! I think this is quite promising. I just signed up.
Thanks Ben!
Let me know how this works out for you!
We are planning to build more interventions. Will wait for suggestions from you.
Have a great day!
I'm getting out of my regular schedule for a bit so won't be able to really get to use it until about ten days from now, but will do!
Sounds awesome! I was actually looking for some app that encourages Deep Work and Productivity. So excited to try it out. Signing up for this right away!
🙌
Hope this helps!
How many meetings you have to attend in a day, usually?
This looks great! Is there a way to connect to both Personal and Work calendars?
Thanks Edison!
Our motif was to manage workplace time.
Just curious now would you be using this your personal calendar?
I will take a look and try to estimate the efforts.